Digital is the only viable medium for news business: Pankaj Pachauri

Titled GoNews, the digital news venture plans to establish itself in the lines public-private-partnership.

Senior journalist and communication advisor to the former Prime Minister's Office under Manmohan Singh, Pankaj Pachauri is just weeks away from launching his own digital news venture - 'GoNews'. He wants 'GoNews' to be like NPR of America. "We want it to be a foundation on the lines of public-private partnership," says Pankaj Pachauri, founder and editor-in-chief, GoNews.

It is after thorough research Pachauri came to the conclusion that "digital is the only viable medium for news business". "Look at the news television companies today, they all make huge losses. The others, such as Zee Network subsidise the news offering through earnings from other genres. On the other hand, if you look at digital, it has already started to surpass TV earnings in the west and the CAGR of digital in India is way more promising than TV," he opines.

Pachauri is backed by "public minded people" as he calls them. The organisation has already made a few hires while a few senior colleagues of his, whom he refused to reveal the name of at this stage, has joined him to take this forward.

"We are not a business first company. Our primary focus would be journalism. We will work hard to build the connect between people and journalism which got lost over the last few years. We have hired a few engineers and MBAs to report on engineering and business related issues, and we will continue the team building process," says Pachauri.

"We are working on the technology and once it's ready we will launch. We will focus on short format videos and text reporting in the initial stages. Later on we will get into long form content. We will target mobile first and then eventually the web-space too. Once everything is settled we will go out to advertisers and our revenue model would be based on advertising. By no means will we let advertising impact our content. We see this happening too often with television channels," he adds. "Our ethical journalism will be our identity." he concludes.

Pachauri was associated with NDTV for over 15 years, he has also had associations with BBC, The Sunday Observer and India Today in the past. In 2012, he was appointed as the communication advisor to the Prime Minister's Office in India under Manmohan Singh. After that he was director at a business school.